Tuesday, March 2, 2010

For our final project, we decided to enhance the controls of a Hummer RC truck. Our main objective was to demonstrate that an Atmel microcontroller together with basic hardware building blocks can replace all of the car’s original circuitry. Improving the RC truck’s handling involved adding analog control over steering and speed.

The original construction of the car hindered this idea and forced us to resort to some mechanical engineering (mounting a servo) to resolve the problem! Overall, the project was a great deal of fun and involved a lot of tinkering with hardware (including dangerous flirtations with nearly exploding power transistors!)